After three years of live streaming of house selling, has Kuaishou “got the hang of it”?

Is online house selling a good business for traffic platforms? As far as the current situation is concerned, many large companies have entered the online house selling business. In the process of business development, Internet companies have also encountered many challenges and obstacles. In this article, the author interprets Kuaishou's entry into the online house selling business. Let's take a look.

Some time ago, Kuaishou released a battle report on live streaming of selling houses.

From November 18 to December 18, 2022, Kuaishou, together with real estate anchors, real estate agencies and developers, held this year's "Kuaishou Home Buying Festival" event. Data released by the platform showed that nearly 6 million people participated in the event, with a GTV (gross transaction volume) of over 3.5 billion yuan, driving transactions in over 45 cities and over 500 real estate projects.

To measure the level of this data, we can compare it with the battle report previously released by Kuaishou. In June 2021, Kuaishou held a home buying festival, selling a total of 257 commercial houses with a GTV of 285 million yuan. This year's home buying festival has been greatly improved in terms of both transaction scale and coverage of cities.

In fact, since 2019, live broadcasting and short videos have become a new marketing outlet for selling houses. Real estate companies’ own live broadcasts and intermediary live broadcasts have become an important means to open up marketing breakthroughs. With such demand, live broadcast platforms are naturally willing to take the stage and use this to derive travel business segments.

In order to grab the cake of online live streaming of house selling, many major companies such as Alibaba, Douyin, and Kuaishou have tried their hand at it, but with little success.

As a traffic platform, what are the chances of Kuaishou's success in entering the real estate market? What are its shortcomings?

1. What has Kuaishou gained from selling houses in three years?

In 2019, Kuaishou divided the real estate and home furnishing vertical into a separate operating department and launched "Kuaishou Ideal Home", which is mainly presented in the form of a mini-program in the Kuaishou APP, but it does not cover many cities. Different from APPs such as Anjuke and Lianjia that mainly target young people, Kuaishou mainly targets second- and third-tier cities and covers a lower-tier population.

On the one hand, "Kuaishou Ideal Home" signs contracts directly with real estate developers, converting real estate KOLs, real estate agents, and developer property consultants into contracted real estate anchors, attracting traffic and acquiring customers through live broadcasts, and ultimately completing house sales.

A year later, Kuaishou's real estate vertical category is about to explode. Data shows that in 2020, Kuaishou's real estate vertical category had 88,000 authors, 400 million fans, and a total of 7.3 million live broadcasts.

Source: Kuaishou Ideal Home Business Map

On the other hand, after three years of accumulation, "Kuaishou Ideal Home" has also become a well-known housing and home furnishing brand. It not only organizes house-viewing groups offline to attract traffic, but also enters the home furnishing section to provide one-stop services such as online house viewing, house buying, and decoration for friends.

In October 2021, some media checked iQiyicha information and found that Kuaishou’s wholly-owned subsidiary Chengdu Kuaigou Technology Co., Ltd. had undergone industrial and commercial changes, and real estate brokerage was added to its business scope.

In April 2022, media reported that Kuaishou established a real estate business center to explore large offline transaction business. The slogan of this department is "running through the business model and breaking through the total transaction volume of 10 billion yuan". The internal letter introduced the department as follows: the establishment of a real estate business center is responsible for meeting the housing purchase needs of Kuaishou users, helping owners sell houses more efficiently, and exploring the business model of large offline transaction business in the closed loop of Kuaishou ecosystem.

Although Kuaishou has not given an official response regarding the establishment of a real estate business center, the idea of ​​Kuaishou entering the real estate business has already been born.

During the May Day holiday in 2022, Kuaishou Ideal Home launched the "May Day Home Buying Festival" in Cangzhou, Shenyang, Tianjin and other places. Participating real estate developers included Country Garden and Shenyang Huizhi, and completed 40 new home sales in 5 days, with a total amount of 35 million yuan. Among them, 17 units were sold in Shenyang alone, with a transaction volume of more than 17 million yuan.

From November 18 to December 18, 2022, Kuaishou cooperated with real estate anchors, real estate agencies and developers to hold this year's "Kuaishou Home Buying Festival". According to data disclosed by Kuaishou officials, nearly 6 million people participated in the event within this month, with a GTV (gross transaction volume) of over 3.5 billion yuan, driving transactions in over 45 cities and over 500 real estate projects.

Behind the eye-catching figures, it is inseparable from the contributions of many real estate anchors. This event has driven more than 360 anchors to generate transactions, and many anchors have a transaction volume of over 100 million yuan . Among them, the transaction volume of anchors such as "Wang Beile" and "Ji Xiaobao" directly exceeded 200 million yuan. Among them, "Wang Beile", as the top real estate anchor of Kuaishou, has set an average of 1,000 live broadcasts per year in 2019 and 2020, and the transaction volume has reached 2 billion.

@王贝乐讲房地产·房选师 Kuaishou video screenshot

2. Traffic platforms grab the real estate pie

Online live streaming of selling houses is nothing new. Not only Kuaishou, but also other Internet giants such as Alibaba, JD.com, and ByteDance have already entered the market.

In 2017, JD.com announced its entry into the real estate market and set a goal of "becoming the double champion in traffic and sales within five years." While cooperating with leading real estate developers such as Country Garden, it also teamed up with platforms such as Tencent and Baidu to create an online traffic pool for house selling.

During the 618 period in 2020, Alibaba teamed up with Country Garden to launch 618 special-price houses. Since then, it has been launching promotional measures such as housing purchase subsidies at important sales nodes, and has also teamed up with Easyhome to launch Tmall Good House.

ByteDance's investment in real estate business is more long-term and large-scale.

ByteDance’s usual thinking is to constantly explore the field of commercial transactions from content information, so it is not surprising that it has developed various businesses such as education, real estate, and finance.

It is worth mentioning that ByteDance's entry into the real estate industry can be regarded as a return to Zhang Yiming's original entrepreneurial aspirations. In 2009, Zhang Yiming spun off the real estate channel of the travel search engine Kuxun and established the vertical real estate search website Jiujiufang. He did not resign from the position of CEO until the end of 2011.

In the process of building the real estate information platform, ByteDance's target of traffic has been changing.

According to 36Kr, in 2018, ByteDance supported "Dongfangdi". The banner advertisement above the real estate channel of Toutiao App can be directly directed to the Dongfangdi App. In addition, advertisements of this product will appear from time to time on Douyin. Before Dongfangdi, these resources on Toutiao were also used for the product "Youyouhaofang".

In August 2019, ByteDance acquired full control of the real estate trading platform "Xingfuli".
At the end of 2021, some media reported that Xingfuli was spun off from ByteDance for independent financing. In mid-September 2022, some media reported that ByteDance had opened several Xiaomai real estate stores in Fuzhou, intending to enter the offline real estate agency market, but the person in charge of Xingfuli said there was no response yet.

According to the "Daily Economic News", the general view in the real estate brokerage industry is that both online and offline capabilities need to be possessed at the same time and neither should be neglected. The combination of Beike and Lianjia seems to have proved the feasibility of this model. Other companies have also tried to find other solutions, but the results are not obvious. Xingfuli seems to be interested in copying this model.

Why have traffic platforms entered the real estate industry one after another and increased their investment in the past two years? There are two main reasons:

On the one hand, affected by the epidemic, the activity of offline real estate transactions has dropped significantly, and consumers' demand for house viewing is difficult to meet, so the online house viewing business has emerged.

On the other hand, although the entire real estate industry has entered an adjustment cycle, the demand for real estate brokerage business is actually "only rising and not falling". In addition to the demand for purchasing new houses, the business of renting second-hand houses also has great market potential.

With the continuous development of the Internet industry, users' reading and browsing habits are also changing, from text reading to video browsing, and then to today's VR real-life experience . It can be said that with the mature development of new media technology, the Internet real estate brokerage market will have great room for growth in the future . Internet companies have naturally smelled the opportunity and entered the market early to grab land.

However, judging from the current public information, the road for Internet giants to enter the real estate industry has not been smooth sailing.

In 2020, when the epidemic was at its most severe, major platforms launched many housing purchase preferential policies during Double 11. Although this also brought a certain number of visits, major platforms did not directly announce sales data that year.

A few excellent anchors cannot support a huge sales scale, and the model that relies on anchors to cooperate in selling goods is also prone to the anchors hijacking the traffic. Some anchors even exaggerate the real estate promotion or fabricate false housing purchase policies in order to gain traffic.

3. What are the challenges of selling houses on Kuaishou?

Selling houses does not mean success just by having an outstanding GTV. If Kuaishou wants to do this business better, there are still many problems that need to be solved.

Although Internet giants have a lot of traffic, if they want to convert the traffic into transactions, they always need to direct the traffic offline. Therefore, for large companies, launching online house viewing, live house selling and other businesses is often just the first step in entering the real estate industry. If they need to develop further in the entire real estate sales chain, they also need to run the entire online and offline closed loop.

For Kuaishou, entering the real estate business requires more thinking and greater determination. In addition to simple models such as providing traffic and cultivating anchors, it may also need to further enhance its multi-terminal operation capabilities.

Taking Alibaba as an example, it has already built up infrastructure such as online payment, electronic signing, and order tracking, and has opened up a link in the digital management of the home buying process; and Xingfuli has gone from online to offline, and in the future it may further connect its own traffic with traditional offline brokerage business.

So what advantages does Kuaishou have over these competitors? If Kuaishou is not determined to make greater investments, even with 626 million monthly active users, its advantages will still not be sufficient.

For example, after consumers and anchors reach a deal, should Kuaishou intervene in the supervision when the real estate developer delivers the property? Although real estate has special attributes, since the transaction is reached through the platform, the platform should provide "after-sales" services.

The offline services that follow live streaming of house sales are also areas that Kuaishou needs to further consider and improve.

From the perspective of industry trends, live streaming of selling houses is becoming a standard feature of major companies, but how online traffic can achieve this offline business with the highest average customer spending may require the platform to blaze a different trail. The challenges facing Kuaishou are still daunting.

Author: Bi Shisan

Source: Caas Data (ID: caasdata6), data empowers short video content creation, operation, marketing and e-commerce sales.